"We Got Him"
A few things to consider about the weekend’s big news. We’ll start with the BBC fun.
- POW status — driving around listening to the BBC World Service on XM yesterday, one of their guests was a British academic (at least it wasn’t the clown from the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University they liked to interview in February — talk about built-in bias) complaining about Saddam’s picture being shown. In his expert opinion, pictures of Saddam should not have been shown in the media, since (again, in his expert opinion) he qualified, as head of the armed forces, as a POW. This statement went completely unchallenged.
- More BBC bias — from the Reporters’ Log, we have this gem from Guto Harri in London: “We all imagined that if the Americans got a tip off they would just bomb somewhere off the face of the earth.” Gee, stereotype Americans much, Guto? The bias speaks for itself, kids.
- French-bashing — they took about 10 minutes to read e-mails from all over the world, including a great one from a listener in Paris. The general tone was something on the order of, “Capturing Saddam was a bad thing, and I’m really scared, because now that the Americans have struck him down, the Ba’athist resistance shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” The mental image of this guy hiding behind his computer waving a white flag had me laughing for a good mile-and-a-half down the road.
The POW issue is of mild concern at best to me. First off, it’s not certain that he qualifies as a POW under the Geneva Convention, even though SecDef Rumsfeld has stated he will be treated as such until further notice. More importantly, getting pictures of him out there proves to all but the most hardcore doubters (Fallujah, Tikrit) that we do truly have him, and that will end the war sooner, with less suffering on all sides. We didn’t need Saddam to turn into an evil Elvis, being spotted all over the world because we wouldn’t show a picture or two before locking him up.
As for how he’s tried… well, let’s just say the Iraqi justice system probably won’t have any problems imposing the death penalty. Iran and Kuwait both want their shot at him, but once the Iraqis are done with him, the other two are liable to have very boring trials on their hands.
And speaking of Star Wars references, Glenn Reynolds broke one out on our counterterror operations, before quoting a Pentagon civilian saying that “[Al-Qaeda’s] decision loop is a lot smaller than ours.” Glenn responded, “That means that ours needs to be smaller, doesn’t it?” It seems to me that Donald Rumsfeld has been trying to do just that, despite lots of interference from some of the military brass.
And in closing, you knew the Photoshop brigades were gonna have a fun time with this one. So in celebration, I bring you…
courtesy of RightWingNews.com
15 December 2003 / 1 Comment / Tags: media, politics